Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Well, I think I’ll look at another Tim Burton movie this month, which will be the third movie I will have reviewed this month. His films are so dark that they just seem right for this month. The film that I will look at is a film adaptation on a stage production. Let’s begin.

Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is so proud of itself at the vision of such a story, and it should. When telling this story, half-measures will benefit him nothing. It looks like the bloodiest musical in stage history, now turned into the bloodiest in film history, and this isn’t a happy dance, but a dark revenge tragedy with heartbreak, havoc and delicious meat pies.

However, we do know watching this and feeling relived that Burton stayed true to the source material. This is one movie that is proof against a happy ending.

What it does have is a satisfactory mixed ending, which is better, where what must happens, does occur. We also have unforgiving performances by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman, with a menacing production design by Dante Ferretti, with the dark shadows of Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography, which allows Burton to show the 19^th Century London of Henry Mayhem’s Labour and the London Poor, which reported on the remains of London and was heavily influenced by Charles Dickens. What we did hear about the Calcutta would have been an improvement on London poverty back then.

Yet, there is an excitement in the very heart of the film, because it has a strong life force. Its heroes, or anti-heroes, have been wounded to the core, its villains are cold and heartless, and they all play on a stage that doesn’t allow decency and mercy. The acting is good that it joins us in the foul story, which even contains a large amount humor – gruesome, to be sure. Roger Ebert even said in his review, “As a feast for the eyes and the imagination, "Sweeney Todd" is ... well, I was going to say, even more satisfying than a hot meat pie made out of your dad.”

The basic story is in London years ago lived a barber named Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) with his wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) and daughter (Jayne Wisener). Then the evil Judge Turpin, played by Alan Rickman, sentenced Barker on made up charges and had him transported to Australia, while kidnapping his wife and daughter. After Turpin steals Barker’s wife, destroying her life, the daughter Johanna grows up to be the judge’s ward and prisoner.

As the film starts, Benjamin escapes prison Down Under and sails into London with Anthony Hope, played by Jamie Campbell Bower. He runs through the street to find his old barbershop, where the landlady is still the dark-eyed beauty Mrs. Lovett, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who sells, as she puts it, the worst pies in London. She tells him what has happened to his family. He goes upstairs to where his old barbershop used to be, now in ruins, and changes his name to Sweeney Todd and starts his business again.

So deep in his anger he makes a change to the building structure: a sliding shaft that will drop his customers straight into the basement after he cuts their throats, so Mrs. Lovett can make them into her meat pies. Now she has on her menu the meatiest and most tender meat pies in London. Business grows, and sometimes satisfied customers to go upstairs for a haircut and now the next victim of being turned into a meat pie.

Ebert says in his review, “Burton fashions his musical in what can almost be described as an intimate style. No platoons of dancers in London squares, as in "Oliver!" This is a London of narrow alleys, streets shadowed by overhangs, close secrets. The Stephen Sondheim songs don't really lend themselves to full-throated performance, although that has been the practice on the stage. They are more plot-driven, confessional, anguished. Depp and Bonham Carter do their own singing, and very well, too, and as actors, they use the words to convey meaning as well as melody.”

There are also cast members that include Sacha Baron Cohen (who you might remember as “Borat”), as the rival Italian barber Pirelli, whose singing career ends rather quick in the film. And with Rickman as the evil judge and the very useful Timothy Spall as Beadle Bamford, his pawn. With Jayne Wisener as Johanna and Jamie Campbell Bower as Anthony, who become infatuated with one another and give some comfort after the last throat is cut.

I have to agree with Ebert says, “To an unusual degree, "Sweeney Todd" works on a quasi-realistic level and not as a musical fantasy. That's not to say we're to take it as fact, but that we can at least accept it on its own terms without the movie winking at us. It combines some of Tim Burton's favorite elements: The fantastic, the ghoulish, the bizarre, the unspeakable, the romantic and in Johnny Depp, he has an actor he has worked with since "Edward Scissorhands" and finds a perfect instrument.”

Helena Bonham Carter may be Burton’s mistress, but aside from that, she is perfectly cast, not as an inappropriate wife who sells fish kind but as a small beauty with dark, sad eyes and a moping mouth and a constant fantasy that she and the barber will someday live by the seaside. Not likely, I say.

In the end, if you haven’t seen this film, go see it, but be forewarned when I say that this is very dark and violent. It’s one of the most violent films I have ever seen, and possibly the darkest musical. Just be very careful when you are watching this film.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the next entry in “Halloween Month.”